THE COMEBACK KID
A look at the murder-mystery that almost sank George R. R. Martin's prolific career
It's 1983 and a bestselling author is doing everything in his power to avoid finishing his next novel. We meet him in his Brooklyn apartment, where he is gazing, in terror, at “the blank paper he was supposedly turning into a book.”
A writer reluctant to finish an anticipated novel will be a concept familiar to readers of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. The saga has spawned Game of Thrones and new Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon. But the seven-volume cycle itself remains conspicuously unfinished, with books six and seven yet to see daylight.
Eleven years have elapsed since the most recent volume in the series, A Dance With Dragons. Martin has been supposedly toiling on the penultimate novel, The Winds of Winter. But Winter is not coming. And it feels prophetic that Martin sketched out just such a scenario — of an author buckling under the pressures of success — in a book he wrote some 40 years ago.
The Armageddon Rag is a rock 'n' roll murder-mystery set in the aftermath of the 1960s hippie revolution. It was intended to be the bestseller that changed Martin's life. And it did. Just not in the way he — or his publishers — anticipated. The book was a flop that ruined Martin's reputation as a novelist. And which drove him to television to make a living.
Our hero is Sandy, a former writer with a Village Voice/creemtype counterculture magazine, The Hedgehog. Back in the 1960s, Sandy was closely associated with a rock band called The Nazgul — a shameless nod towards J.R.R. Tolkien — until their brooding singer was shot dead at a Woodstock-style concert. But now The Nazgul's former manager has been ritualistically killed. Is this connected to rumours the Nazgul are to reform with a new frontman?
The Armageddon Rag is a meaty caper in its own right. It also can be read as a testing ground for many of the concepts that Martin would later bring to A Song of Fire and Ice, beginning in 1996 with the novel A Game of Thrones.
Fire and ice are presented as opposing forces throughout The Armageddon Rag — fire embodying the hippie ideals of the '60s, ice the reactionary forces of law and order. In Game of Thrones they embody the feuding royal houses of the dragon-riding Targaryens and the Starks of snowbound Winterfell — while in the TV show they are seen as representing Mother of Dragons Daenerys and the Night King (a shadowy, offstage figure in the novels).
In other ways, The Armageddon Rag couldn't be further than the Seven Kingdoms. Its setting is the real world and the den of iniquity that is the music industry. This is also the book in which Martin, born in 1948, reveals himself to be a child of the '60s. Welcome to his groovy, woozy Boomer novel.
To say more would be to ruin the plot of a book worth rediscovering. If only as a reminder that Martin can do more than medieval violence and sexposition. So why did it fail? One likely reason is that The Armageddon Rag is hard to put in a box. The book starts as a lament for the death of the hippie dream. It then turns into a gory murder mystery before arriving at its final destination, Neil Gaiman-style urban fantasy bleeding into Lovecraftian horror. It's a lot.
Martin makes these various moving parts work. And yet, Boomer-contemporary fantasy built around fire and ice motifs was always going to be a hard sell. So perhaps it is no surprise The Armageddon Rag didn't merely underperform. It flopped spectacularly.
Until the controversially clunking ending to the Game of Thrones TV series in 2019, it was the biggest debacle with which Martin had been associated.
The experience left him understandably disillusioned. It wasn't simply that he'd fallen out of love with publishing. Publishing had fallen out of love with him. He was paid six figures for The Armageddon Rag. However, as he surveyed the crater where his literary reputation used to be, Martin discovered that now he could not command even five figures as a writer. He settled for four figures — only to find that nobody wanted to pay him that meagre amount, either. He was a bust.
Television was his salvation. One of the few readers to have enjoyed The Armageddon Rag was writer/ producer Philip Deguere (best known for Simon & Simon). He optioned the novel, with the idea of filming its rock 'n' roll scenes at concerts by his friends, The Grateful Dead. These plans sputtered out. However, a few years later, CBS tasked Deguere with rebooting the sci-fi mystery series, The Twilight Zone. The first person he called was Martin.
Martin worked in television for a decade. Over that period, his love for writing — and, in particular, for epic fantasy, was rekindled. He was impressed by the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy by Tad Williams, which introduced sex and violence to Tolkien-style high fantasy. And by Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time — which wove a sprawling story over more than a dozen novels (Jordan would die before finishing the saga).
Martin had cooled on TV by the late 1980s. In 1987 he created a contemporary retelling of Beauty and the Beast, starring Ron Perlman and Linda Hamilton. But his vision of a bloody take on the timeless tale met with resistance at CBS.
“There were constant limitations. It wore me down,” he would say. “There were battles over censorship, how sexual things could be, whether a scene was too `politically charged,' and how violent things could be ... We got into that fight on Beauty and the Beast. The Beast killed people. That was the point.”
As all of this was playing out, an idea popped into Martin's head. “It just came to me, this scene, from
what would ultimately be the first chapter of A Game of Thrones. It's from Bran's viewpoint (in the book, the event is relayed from the perspective of his father, Ned Stark); they see a man beheaded and they find some dire wolf pups in the snow. It just came to me so strongly and vividly that I knew I had to write it.”
Game of Thrones, the first volume of a Song of Ice and Fire, came out in August 1996. Pre-internet, the 13 years that had elapsed since publication of The Armageddon Rag was a lifetime — and so Martin's earlier work was by then lost to obscurity. But if the rest of the world forgot The Armageddon Rag, Martin never did. For him, it was a cautionary tale: no matter how successful you think you are, you are only ever a single calamity away from losing everything.
Maybe that's why, 26 years on, he hasn't finished A Song of Ice and Fire. Everybody hated the ending to the television show. Would Martin's version be any better? Having suffered through The Armageddon Rag, perhaps he has decided one publishing disaster is enough in anyone's career.